The Great Lie 
Charles Glass
- The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World by Avi Shlaim
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 by Benny Morris
- A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East by Amos Elon
- Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ by Efraim Karsh
- From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism by Amnon Rubinstein
An Israeli Jewish woman told me a story about her father’s return, many years later, to the house in Vienna that his family had abandoned in 1938. More than any of the other possessions he had lost when Austria merged with Germany, he told her, it was his library that he missed and longed to see again. Yet the old Viennese gentleman could not bring himself to enter the flat in which he had grown up. His daughter, born in Palestine, remembers him in his hat and coat, unable to speak. ‘We stood downstairs in the courtyard, and my father pointed at the apartment where they lived. A woman came down and looked at us with suspicion. My father said he had lived here once. She was not impressed, only more cold.’ The woman explained, in her Austrian German, that, when she arrived after the war, his books had already gone.
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Charles Glass has recently published two books on the Middle East, The Northern Front and The Tribes Triumphant, and is writing a book set in France during the German occupation.
Other articles by this contributor:
Learning from Its Mistakes · Hizbullah
Cyber-Jihad · What Osama Said
The New Piracy · Terror on the High Seas
Is Syria next? · Charles Glass reports from Damascus
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